Eternity's Wheel

by Neil Gaiman

  “What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him to watch over the bodies.” Jai was smart; he’d get it.

  “Okay. Joey,” she said, as we started to go down different corridors. She paused. “Don’t screw up,” she warned, the ghost of a smile passing over her face.

  I nodded, and we went our separate ways. It may have seemed harsh, but that was Jo’s style—and her telling me not to mess up was more than a warning. It was a declaration. It meant she would follow me, and so would everyone else. It meant I couldn’t mess up, because everyone was depending on me now.

  It was something I was already painfully aware of.

  “Hey,” I called, as I rounded another corner to see Avery. He was standing in front of the Wall, our memorial to the fallen. It had started outside the infirmary, no one knew when or by whom, and back on InterWorld Alpha I was used to it spanning one side of a long hallway. Here, on this InterWorld so far in the future, it extended out into three different halls at least.

  He shifted slightly at my voice, though he didn’t turn. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular, just the Wall in general, which had everything from bits of seashells to silly doodles to jewelry or feathers and teeth from species I’d never heard of. There was a lot to look at, and each thing held personal significance for a Walker long dead.

  “Come to interrogate me?” he asked as I drew closer.

  “Give me a reason not to,” I said. “Tell me exactly why you’re here.” He turned his head to look at me, his violet eyes cold.

  “I was returning your cyborg.”

  “What else?”

  He lifted his chin slightly, considering me. After a moment, he said “I am fulfilling the mission of another Agent who is currently LAS.”

  “LAS?”

  He glanced away for a moment, as though I were trying his patience. “Lost at sea. An equivalent term for you, I suppose, would be MIA.”

  “Acacia,” I said. I’d been through so much in the last twenty minutes that the thought of her being missing didn’t upset me as much as it maybe should have. “You don’t know where she is?”

  “I had hoped that you would,” he said, looking at me coolly, “since you’re the last person on record to see her.”

  “What do you mean, ‘on record’?”

  “That is classified and none of your business, and I won’t explain it.”

  “Fine,” I said, matching his tone. “Then, since you’re here in her place, and I’m here in the Old—in Captain Harker’s place, I’m going to tell you the same thing he told her: You have prime clearance, as long as you’re escorted at all times. That escort will be me. You spend one second out of my sight, and I will consider you a threat to this ship and the people on it.”

  “Fine,” was all I got in response. I should have expected it.

  I turned to leave again, assuming he’d follow me. He did, though not without another lingering glance back to the Wall. I paused, curiosity getting the better of me.

  “You called her ‘Josie,’ like you knew her. Why?”

  If I’d thought he was cold before, the look he gave me now almost froze me where I stood. “That,” he said, his fingers brushing over the hilt of his sword, “is also none of your business.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment, and then I turned my back on him and started for the mess hall.

  There were twenty-five of us total in the mess hall, since Jai and J/O were still in the engine room, and we’d lost four of us since the last time I’d done a head count.

  Four of us, in the last twenty minutes.

  I stood on a table, facing the room at large, the gathered Walkers standing or sitting around me. The room was a wreck; it looked like it had been used as a choke point for whatever it was that had attacked InterWorld. Tables were overturned and had been used as barricades; chairs were discarded and broken; various bits of metal and machinery that had probably once been weapons were scattered about the floor. I took it all in, trying to recapture what those last moments would have been like, and trying not to let the hopelessness of the situation overtake me. If this was to be InterWorld’s end, what point was there in what I was doing now?

  It was quite simple, really. This was what I knew. It was what I’d been trained for—hell, for all I could tell, it was what I’d been born for. Me, and every other version of me there was. I couldn’t not do it.

  But, God, that was so hard to remember when I was standing there, looking at their faces. Most of them were tear streaked, dirty, and tired. Some were bruised or scratched, and they all looked as beaten down as I felt. I wondered if this was how the Old Man felt when he spoke to us after a failed mission. I wonder if he’d trained himself not to feel anything at all.

  “I’m sure a lot of you are wondering what the hell happened,” I started, deciding to get right to the point. “Near as I can tell, after the first group we sent with Josephine and Hue—my mudluff friend—arrived safely here, the large expenditure of Walker energy caught the attention of a HEX agent known as Lady Indigo. She was ready for the second group when we tried to Walk, and pulled us into the Nowhere-at-All. Three of us were killed.

  “Josephine Harker was a Walker I recruited and trained, and though she was new to Walking, she was very, very good at it. She used this to her advantage and slipped away while the rest of us were captured. I didn’t sense her, and neither did Lady Indigo. She, along with TimeWatch Agent Avery Jones, came to our rescue. It is because of them that we escaped as we did. However, Lady Indigo formed an energy link with Josephine that would have allowed her to track us here, even through time. We severed that link, which means we are safe from her for now. Unfortunately, Josephine was killed in the process.” As hard as all of that had been to say, it was nothing compared to what I had to get through next.

  “Her last wish was to have her spirit used to jump-start this ship.” A murmur went through the crowd from those who hadn’t been present for that discussion; I fought to control the wave of guilt that swept over me, to ignore the voice in my head that told me I didn’t deserve to be standing before them like some kind of leader. I’d let us get captured, gotten several of us killed, and then used my first recruit just like our enemies would have.

  Forcing myself to continue, I said “J/O and Jai are overseeing the process of bringing power back to the ship. Once we’re up and running, we’ll see how far the engines will take us. In the meantime, our priorities are twofold. First, we have to get the ship in order. This is our temporary base of operations until we can get back to InterWorld Prime, which brings me to our second goal.

  “When last I saw it, InterWorld Prime—or InterWorld Alpha, as I’ve been calling it—had been detected by a HEX ship. They’ve thrown the engines into overdrive and punched it, but HEX is right on their tail. This means they can’t stop, which means they can’t help us. Everyone on that ship, including the Old Man, is trapped until we find a way to help them.”

  I let that sink in, already dividing them up into groups in my head, sorting out who would be best for what. It was surprisingly easy; I knew my team and their capabilities, and I was passingly familiar with a handful of the others here. Joeb knew many of them better, so I could work with him to place people into teams. By the time the murmuring had died down again, I’d figured out the people I needed.

  “Joeb, Jo, and Josef, with me. Everyone else, get to the living quarters and pick a bunk. They’re all pretty messed up; you’re responsible for cleaning yours out, but don’t just move any junk or debris into another room. Take it all the way out to the courtyard. You three,” I said to Joeb, Jo, and Josef, who’d stepped forward. “The Old Man’s office. You, too,” I told Avery, who had been leaning one shoulder against the wall, arms folded, listening quietly. He fell into step behind us, and as we left I heard the others start filing out toward the living quarters.

  It still boggled my mind that people were just . . . doing what I told them. No one had said a word nor asked a
question nor wondered why I was giving orders. Granted, I was the only one who currently knew everything that was going on . . . which led me to the third part of our mission, the one I hadn’t told anyone about. Yet.

  I’d chosen the Old Man’s office because it was a secure room with one entrance, one we could see from any angle. I still wasn’t taking any chances with J/O, and I’d already learned my lesson about the possibility of traitors in our midst. The only other one of us I was unsure of was Avery Jones, because he wasn’t one of us, but it was better to keep him with me than let him wander around unsupervised.

  “Joey . . .” Jo paused in the doorway to the Old Man’s receiving room. It still existed in my memory as the personalized, semicozy office space the Old Man’s assistant Josetta had always kept, not as the wreck it was now. There had been comfortable, plush waiting chairs and a soft, colorful rug, and Josetta’s desk had been covered with knickknacks and multicolored Post-its. It had been one of the few rooms on base, aside from our own individual ones, that showed any sort of personality.

  Now it was covered in a layer of fine dust and ash, the rug long since disintegrated, the desk overturned, and the chairs rotted. Jo stood in the doorway, her wings fluffed up slightly in alarm. “Why here?” she asked.

  “Because it’s the closest thing we have to soundproof,” I said, ushering Joeb, Josef, and Avery into the Old Man’s office. “And I have things to say that can’t leave this room. Come on.”

  She hesitated a moment more, then visibly steeled herself and crossed the threshold. I knew how she felt; like we were intruding, standing in shoes we had no right to even think of filling.

  I’d been feeling like that since I first got here.

  “I called in you three for a few reasons,” I began. “First, I trust you. Second, I need you.” I looked at Joeb.

  “Joeb, you and Jai are the only senior officers I have, and I’ll need Jai here for a while. You have more experience than any of us with extracting Walkers, and that’s what I need you to do. Put together a team or do it solo, it’s your call, but I need you to go get more of us. As many as you can find. You’ll need Hue to sense them; I’ll show you how.”

  He nodded, seeming unsurprised by the request and (to my relief) unbothered by the notion of working with my mudluff friend. Many of us (including myself, not that it had stopped me) had been taught from the beginning that MDLFs were incredibly dangerous, so most of my teammates had never quite grown to trust Hue.

  “Josef, you’re in charge of clearing out the debris. We need clear hallways, and access to the equipment lockers. I have no idea what, if anything, is in there; it’s completely blocked, Josephine . . . and I weren’t able to get in.” I paused for a moment, a half second after her name. I couldn’t help it. Maybe if we’d been able to get more equipment out of the lockers, she would have had more of a chance against Lady Indigo. Maybe if I’d done anything differently . . .

  Josef nodded amiably, his curly head barely brushing the ceiling. “I can probably move most of it myself,” he said.

  “Get J/O to help you if you can’t, as soon as he has the ship up and running.” He nodded again, and I turned to Jo. She was getting the worst job, but I knew she’d be the best at it. She was practical and organized, and sometimes seemed to have more common sense than everyone else put together.

  “Jo, I need you to put together several teams in charge of getting the facilities up and running. The kitchens, lavatories, and infirmary are the priorities. We managed with two of us, but there are over twenty now, and with Joeb’s help”—I glanced to him briefly—“there should be more. Soon.” Both Joeb and Jo nodded seriously. As I’d hoped, Jo had accepted the task without complaint. I made a mental note to make it up to her later, somehow.

  If there was a later.

  “Okay,” I said, taking a breath. “Joeb gets first priority on Walkers, then Josef, then Jo. Work it out.”

  They looked at me, then each other. There was a moment of silence, then Jo went back out to Josetta’s waiting room, where I could hear her digging around for anything that might be useful for taking notes. Josef nodded to me and followed. Joeb stopped to give my uninjured shoulder a careful squeeze, then went out after them.

  “Not bad,” Avery said. “You almost sound like a leader.”

  “Glad you think so,” I replied, “because you’re about to get debriefed.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “You said your people found J/O wandering through the timestream, and you cleaned out the virus and brought him here. Tell me more.”

  He folded his arms.

  Just when I thought he wasn’t going to answer me (and I didn’t have any idea what I intended to do if that were the case—I could threaten him, but I wasn’t sure I could take him in a fight even were I at the top of my game, which I most certainly was not . . . ), he shrugged and spoke. “My people picked up an anomaly in the navigation system.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It’s on a need to know basis,” he said. “And you don’t.”

  “Fair,” I admitted, nodding for him to continue.

  “Your friend was tripping all kinds of alarms, wandering around through time like that. Not only did we need to stop him, we needed to figure out how he was doing it. You Walkers can’t sail those storms, at least not without the help of an MDLF.”

  Though I didn’t like the obnoxious way he said you Walkers, I had to admit he was right.

  “Did you find out how he was managing it when you cleaned out the virus?”

  Avery hesitated, probably deciding whether or not this counted as “need to know.” “Yes, but it was programming he shouldn’t have had. We determined that it was a supplementary drive installed in his processing center.”

  “You mean, they added new software to him?”

  “More like they added the hardware required to support the software upgrades, but, yes. We removed it along with the virus.”

  I was a bit irritated at everyone’s apparently fishing around in J/O’s guts (or circuits, whatever) without his permission, but I understood why it had been done. Binary had done it because, hey, they’re the bad guys. TimeWatch had done it because they had the monopoly on time travel, and wanted to keep it that way.

  Not that they were doing a very good job—and not that I was ruling out the possibility of them being bad guys, mind you. My friendship with Acacia aside, I had yet to meet one single Agent of TimeWatch who didn’t completely rub me the wrong way. Including Acacia.

  “There’ve been two, so far.” I said.

  “What?”

  “J/O, and Lady Indigo. That’s two people in recent memory who have been able to do something we thought was impossible. Fixing on essence and tracking through time, specifically.”

  Avery narrowed his eyes. “I said the witch created a link. I never said she fixed on Josephine’s essence.”

  “But that’s what she did, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Avery admitted, watching me closely. “What do you know about time signatures and essence waves?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I said, and he looked both doubtful and suspicious. “I mean it. I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

  “You knew enough to call it ‘essence,’” he accused.

  “That’s what J/O said when he was tracking us through time. He said he’d fixed on our essence. Acacia said that’s what the Techmaturges did.” If I thought he’d looked suspicious before, he looked downright accusatory now.

  “Did she,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” I said. “But if it makes you feel any better, I didn’t hear that name from her. She was as surprised as you are that I knew about them.”

  “And where did you hear about them?”

  “That’s need to know,” I said, admittedly a bit more smugly than I meant to. I heard a subtle click clack coming from the hilt of his sword as he shifted his stance. “But regardless, I first heard the word ‘essence’ u
sed like that from J/O. He said he was fixed on our essences, and could follow us anywhere. Binary agents can’t normally do that. Neither can HEX, as far as I was aware, but you didn’t seem at all surprised that Lady Indigo had created a link like that.”

  “The witch had grown her powers beyond those of a normal HEX agent during her time in the Nowhere-at-All. It is surprising that she was able to do what she did, but not impossible. Especially not with the powers of those she’d absorbed.”

  I winced at the word “absorbed.” Those had been my friends. “Fine. So, she could do it because of that, and J/O could do it because he’d been programmed to.”

  “Correct.”

  “But he can’t, anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “And he’s completely okay, now.”

  “Yes. He retains the memories but not the programming. You can trust him as much as you ever did.”

  “Great.” I paused. “How much can I trust you?”

  Avery smirked.

  “If you say that’s ‘need to know,’ I swear I will eject you from this ship into an erupting volcano,” I warned. “I know of several exact times and places, believe me. Pompeii is particularly nice this time of year.”

  “It is need to know. Fortunately, you do.” His smirk faded and he sighed. “You may trust that I have no ill intentions toward you or anyone on this ship. My mission, in fact, is to help you. As was my sister’s.”

  It was the first time he’d acknowledged the relationship between him and Acacia, though I wasn’t entirely surprised—they did look so much alike. I was more confused with the knowledge of what her mission—and now, his—had been. “Help me what?”

  He gave another little sigh, as though I was trying his patience again. “You may recall that HEX and Binary have joined forces to unleash some kind of Multiverse-reshaping horror, do you not?”

  “FrostNight.”